“And everything,” said Moore somberly. They ate in silence for a moment, thinking of the days when the world had been so eager to hear what they had to say.
In those days everyone wanted to give them a voice. Radio, television, press coverage; there was nothing anyone might say about flying saucers, or men from another planet, or mysterious revelations received in a trance, or astral voyages to other worlds that did not get an audience. A
paying
audience. Both Moore and Boccanegra had had their pick of college lecture dates and handsome honoraria—enough for Boccanegra to start The Press of Ultimate Truth, Inc., to print his books; enough for Moore to buy the tract of played-out Oklahoma grazing land that became the Eudorpan Astral Retreat. Both had flourished wildly. There was no end to the customers for Boccanegra’s books, more than fifteen titles in all, or to the Seekers who gladly paid a month’s wages to spend a week in their lavender robes, eating lentils and raw onions out of EAR’s wooden bowls (and sneaking off to the truck stop just outside the Retreat for hamburgers and sinful beer), and listening worshipfully to Moore’s revelations.
When the last of the pastrami and fries was gone, Moore leaned back and signaled for a coffee refill. He looked thoughtfully at Boccanegra and said, “I’ve been looking forward to your new book. Is it out yet?”
“It’s been held up,” Boccanegra explained. Actually it was a year overdue, and the new book wasn’t going to appear until the bills for the last one were paid, and that didn’t seem likely in the near future. “Of course,” he added with as near a smile as he ever allowed himself in public, “the timing might be better later on. It’s all Martians now, isn’t it?”
Moore was startled. “Are you writing a book about the Martians?” he demanded.
“Me? Of course not,” Boccanegra said virtuously. “Oh, there are charlatans who’ll be doing that, no doubt. I’ll bet there are a dozen of the old guard trying to change their stories around to cash in on the Martians.”
“Shocking,” Moore agreed with a straight face.
“Anyway, I’ve about decided to take a sort of sabbatical. This fad will run its course. Perhaps in a few months it’ll be the right time for my book, which tells how the Great Galactics have provided us with the genetic code that explains all of the mysteries of—”
“Yeah,” said Moore, staring into space. His expression did not suggest that he liked what he was seeing.
Boccanegra studied his ancient adversary. It didn’t look like a very good time to bring up the sudden inspiration that had come to him in the elevator. Moore sounded depressed.
But there would never be a better time, so Boccanegra plunged in. “I’ve been thinking,” he said.
Moore focused on him. “Yes?”
Boccanegra waved a deprecating hand. “I’ll probably have some free time for awhile. Perhaps the whole summer. So, I wonder—would you be interested in having me as a sort of guest lecturer at the Retreat?” Moore’s eyes widened under the bushy eyebrows, but he didn’t speak. Boccanegra went on ingratiatingly, “Since I’m at liberty, I mean. Of course, we’d have to make some special arrangement. It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to be there just as part of your staff. Some new position? Perhaps I could wear black robes? Naturally the financial arrangements could be worked out—professional courtesy and all that,” he finished with a twinkle.
The twinkle dried up. Moore’s expression was stony. “No chance,” he said.
Boccanegra felt the muscles in his throat begin to tighten. “No chance,” he repeated, trying to keep the sudden anger out of his voice. “Well, if it’s the robes—”
“It isn’t the robes,” said Anthony Makepeace Moore.
“No, it wouldn’t be that. I suppose, since you and I have been pretty much opponents for so long—”
“Marco,” said Moore sadly, “I don’t give a shit about that. I can’t take you on at the Retreat because there isn’t going to be any Retreat this year. I haven’t got the customers. By this time I should have had forty or fifty people registered—some years I’ve had a hundred! You know how many I’ve got now? Two. And one of those is only a maybe.” He shook his head. “The whole thing’s down the tube if something good doesn’t happen. The bank’s been on my back about the mortgage, and they put in that damn interstate and even the truck stop’s losing money every week—”
Boccanegra was startled. “I didn’t know you owned the truck stop!”
“Well, this time next month I probably won’t. They even took out the Coke machine.”
Boccanegra sat in thoughtful silence for a moment. Then he laughed out loud and waved to the grouchy waitress for more coffee.
“You, too,” he said. “Well, let’s put our heads together and see if we can figure something out.”
By the time of the fourth refill the waitress was muttering audibly to herself.
The problem wasn’t just the fickle tastes of the public. It was the Martians. There simply was no room for imaginary wonders in the public attention when the real thing was getting a few hundred thousand miles closer to Earth every day. And the unfair part of it was that the Martians were so damned
dull.
They didn’t have spiritual counseling for the troubled billions of Earth. They didn’t warn of impending disasters, or offer hope of salvation. They just stood there in their stalls on the spaceship
Algonquin
9, swilling down their scummy soup.
“I guess you’ve gone over all your books to see if there’s anything about Martians in them?” Moore said hopefully.
Boccanegra shook his head. “I mean, yes, I looked. Nothing.”
“Me, too,” Moore sighed. “I’ll tell you the truth, Marco, I never for one minute considered the possibility that when we were visited by creatures from outer space they would be
stupid.
Say!” he cried, sitting up. “What if we say they aren’t real? I mean, they’re like the household pets of the real Eudorpans?”
“The Great Galactics,” Boccanegra corrected eagerly. “Or maybe not pets but, you know, like false clues the superior space beings put there to throw us off the trail?”
“And we can say we’ve had revelations about it, and—well, hell, Marco,” said Moore, suddenly facing reality. “Would anybody believe us?”
“Has that ever made any difference?”
“No, but really, it’d be good if we had some kind of, you know, evidence.”
“Evidence,” Boccanegra said thoughtfully.
“See, these Martians will actually be here in a few months, right? Next thing you know they’ll be landing, and they’ll be in a zoo or something, and people can see them for themselves. They don’t talk, but they might, you know, communicate something that could blow us right out of the water.”
“They really
are
stupid, Tony.”
“Yes, but, Marco, if they’ve got some kind of writings that we don’t know about, because all we’ve ever seen is what they sent on the TV from the spaceship—”
“But maybe they’re degenerate,” Boccanegra cried, “so they don’t know what the stuff
really
means!”
“Well,” Moore said doggedly, “there might be a real problem there, all the same. If we wait until they land …” Then he shook his head. “Scratch that. We can’t wait that long, at least I can’t. I could stall the creditors for maybe a month or two, but the spaceship isn’t going to land till nearly Christmas.”
“And this is only June.” Boccanegra puzzled for a moment; there had been, he was almost sure, something good they had come quite close to. But what was it?
“How about,” said Moore, “if we found some
other
Martians?”
Boccanegra frowned. “Besides the ones they’ve found, you mean? Somewhere else on Mars?”
“Not necessarily on Mars. But the same sort of creatures, maybe on Venus, maybe on the Moon—we say they live in caves, see? So nobody’s seen them? I mean, they do live in caves on Mars, right? There could even have been some long ago on, what’s its name, that moon of Jupiter that’s always having volcanic eruptions, only the volcanoes killed them off.”
“Um,” said Boccanegra. “Yeah, maybe.” He was scowling in concentration, because that faint ringing of cash registers was still in his ears, only he couldn’t quite tell where it came from. “I don’t see where we get any kind of evidence that way, though,” he pointed out. “I’d like it if we had something right here on Earth about that.”
“Okay, Antarctica! There’s a colony of them on Antarctica, or at least there used to be, but they died of cold after the continents migrated.”
“There are people all over Antarctica, Tony. Scientific camps. Russians and Americans and everybody.”
“Well, could they be at the bottom of the sea?”
“They’ve got those robot submarines going down there all the time.”
“Sure,” Moore said, improvising, “but those are all U.S. Navy or something, aren’t they? The subs have seen all the proof in the world, but the government’s covering up.”
“That’s good,” Boccanegra said thoughtfully. “Let’s see if I’ve got the picture. There were beings like these Martians all over the solar system once. Of course, they’re not really ‘Martians.’ It’s just that the first live specimens that turned up were on Mars, all right? They’ve been on Earth, too, ever since the time the Great Galactics came—the people from Planet Theta, too,” he added quickly. “And all these years they’ve been hiding
down there, exerting an influence on what has happened to the human race. It hasn’t all been good: wars, depressions—”
“Crazy fads. Narcotics,” Moore put in.
“Right! All the things that have gone wrong, it’s because these Martians have been willing it; they’ve degenerated and become evil. We don’t call them Martians, of course. We call them something like Emissaries, or Guardians, or—what’s a bad kind of guardian?”
“Dead Souls,” said Moore triumphantly.
“Sure, they’re Dead Souls. Sounds kind of Russian, but that’s not bad, either. And they’ve been in Antarctica under the ice and … Aw, no,” he said, disappointed. “It won’t work. We can’t get to Antarctica.”
“So?”
“So how do we get evidence that there really are Dead Souls there?”
“I don’t really see why you keep harping on evidence,” Moore said irritably.
“I don’t mean evidence like finding a real, live Dead Soul kind of Martian,” Boccanegra explained. “You know. We need some sort of message. Mystic drawings. Carvings. Something like the Nazco lines, or whatever they call them, or the rune stone in Minnesota. Of course,” he explained, “they wouldn’t be in any Earthly language. We work out translations.
Partial
translations, because we don’t give the whole thing at once; we keep translating new sections as we go along.”
“We get the key from Planet Theta in a trance,” Moore said helpfully.
“Or astral projection,” Boccanegra nodded, “from the Great Galactics.” He thought for a moment, and then said wistfully, “But it would be better if we had something to take photographs of. I always put photographs in my books; they really make a difference, Tony.”
“Maybe we could crack open some rocks, like Richard Shaver? And find mystic drawings in the markings?”
“I don’t like to repeat what anybody else has done,” Boccanegra said virtuously. “And I don’t know where Shaver got the rocks, either. Maybe in a cave, or—”
He stopped in midsentence, the ringing of the cash bells now loud and clear. They stared at each other.
“A cave,” Moore whispered.
“Not under the ocean. Under the ground! Tony! Are there any caves under the Retreat?”
“Not a one,” Moore said regretfully. “I didn’t think of that when I bought the tract. But, listen, there are millions of caves all over. All we have to do is find one big one with a lot of passages no one ever goes into—”
“There are lots right along the Mississippi River,” Boccanegra chimed in. “There’s even the Mammoth Cave, or Carlsbad—why, there are some in Pennsylvania that haven’t even been explored much.”
“And then maybe I can say I’ve seen the carvings while I was in astral projection—”
“And then I can actually go there and discover them and take pictures!” Boccanegra finished triumphantly. “I wouldn’t say where they came from at first—”
“—until we got a chance to put the drawings there—”
“—and nobody would argue, because everybody knows you and I have never worked together—”
“—and they’d be kind of like Shaver’s Deros—”
“—only not deranged robots; they’ll look kind of like the Martians, because they’re the same Dead Souls, and they mess everything up for humanity because they’re evil—”
“And we’ll split the money!” Moore cried. “You do your books. I’ll do the Retreats. Maybe along about Labor Day you and I can have a public reconciliation, submerging our old differences because now we’ve discovered this ultimate reality not even we suspected before—”
“—and I can come to the Retreat—”
“And, sure, you can have black robes,” Moore said generously. “Marco, it’s doable! The good old days are coming back, for sure!”